I was building a server for Santa’s Workshop Inc., to accommodate an upgrade for their Check it Twice software, when it occurred to me that this is a great year to be on his good list. Don’t get after me for bringing up Santa this early–most stores I’ve been in have some hint that Christmas is close, and there’s a Christmas store...

I was splitting some wood using a rather old but ingenious piece of technology. It’s called an axe. A splitting axe, to be specific, and if you really know your axes, this one has splitting wedges that push out when embedded rapidly into the wood. The handle was a nice carbon mixture that was good and stiff. All these innovations helped me in the...

There are a lot of good sites that help you plan for the future. My favorite planning sites include ways to look into exactly what you want, and turn your plans inside and out while looking at them from many different angles. I’m talking, of course, about car configuration sites. For example, at the Porsche site I can plan for that time in the future when...

When I need help finding something in the grocery store I generally don’t ask because it gives me a chance to browse (I like grocery shopping for some baffling reason). Most of the time I find the item I’m looking for, but those few times I cannot locate the desired article, an intelligent looking employee is queried by yours truly and the search is...

I bought a nice, top of the line laptop from Dell two years ago. In the first year, my hard drive, modem, and one stick of 512 MB RAM had to be replaced. Thankfully, it was under warranty. Stupid me…I only bought one year of warranty service. Dell was very good at providing warranty replacement parts. I didn’t get on-site service because, well,...

My two boys like to make Lego stop motion videos using a digital camera, a tripod, Windows Movie Maker, a mountain of Lego, and admirable creativity. They had a thirty day trial version of Adobe Premier Pro more than thirty days ago, which was much easier to use, but Dad (me) can not afford the price. I have to commend them for doing this project with the most...

I have been using my computer on battery because the power has been off here for over five hours. I’m vacationing in cottage country in Ontario, Canada, and there was a wind storm last night. With the exception of our neighbour’s generator humming away in the background, it’s pretty quiet. I like the short-term feeling that we are...

In my hush-hush life as a secret agent (don’t tell anyone), I naturally use extreme technology from the mundane, everyday chat with headquarters, to high tech cars armed with lasers and missiles that blow up bad guys. You probably see me or one of my compatriots daily racing around the streets of Toronto, New York, Paris, or Milan. Technology makes my life...

I was talking with a buddy of mine about gadgets, and the discussion turned to that most important gadget of all, the PIM. What would be the ultimate device that we could take along with us? We of course came up with a 10 mega pixel camera, video camera, voice recorder, and, well, you know how the list can go on and on. So, instead of making up a list of...

Thanks to improvements in technology, starships of all shapes and sizes are becoming obsolete faster than you can learn a Klingon war chant. The old ships are decommissioned and computer technicians around the world are grabbing these up so they can be beamed to a client’s site and fix their problems as quickly as the customer expects. I’ve had the...

I found out that I am actually from an alternate universe. I discovered this when I tried to use the latest beta release of IE7 for a website I created. In the universe I am from Microsoft promised a year ago to make IE 7 compliant with W3C standards. I think you can see where I am going with this. In the universe I am from there is only one...